Daily Action Alert Is the New Service That Lets You Use Your Phone to Fight Trump

When my husband, Arun, joined the Barack Obama campaign in 2007, I was happy to move to Chicago with him, and even happier, in subsequent months, to get VIP access to Obama rallies and White House seasonal parties. But my involvement ended there. In my career as a writer, I preferred to avoid current events: I wrote young adult novels, and book reviews, and lifestyle journalism about health and parenting and other such evergreens. Though I love the horse race aspect of politics, I’ve never been remotely compelled to participate, beyond some light election-year phone banking and canvassing.

All that changed this past election night, when I watched our country collapse in seven open tabs of The New York Times election interactives. This complete charlatan, this self-proclaimed serial sexual assaulter who had stirred up so much hatred against minorities and women and pretty much anyone who wasn’t as powerful as he was—he had actually won. An erratic extremist was about to be in charge of the deeply flawed but nevertheless hopey-changey country that I had brought my children into, the country that I suddenly realized I loved very much. Too much to let this one slide.

I kept thinking about my long-dead grandfather, who had stayed in Berlin perilously late, until September 1938, because he—like so many other educated, prosperous Jews—in the words of my father’s cousin, “thought Hitler would fold.” There was no reason to upend his whole life for a cheap used car salesman of a popular agitator, until suddenly there was.

“If Hillary had won,” a friend said to me a few days after the upset, “we would be sitting here eating our kale Caesars and talking about amazing Netflix series and feeling totally great about our lives.”

It was true. Nothing in my external life had changed. But Hillary hadn’t won, and our futures—my children’s futures—had become terrifyingly unknowable overnight. Until November 8, I’d harbored a basic faith in our Constitution; I’d believed that the institutions of our government were more or less impregnable. I no longer felt so sure.

And so, for the first time in my life, I felt compelled to fight back. I needed to do more than fork over money to right-minded organizations and sign the many petitions that crossed my screen. Basking in the unanimous horror of my coastal-elite bubble provided comfort, but we were all spinning in the same useless circles. We wanted to do something, but what exactly? As is so often the case on the left, we had ideals, but no organization. Then, while scrolling through yet another despairing Facebook thread, I had an idea: What if I could help curate the controversies and use technology to keep people engaged in holding the new administration accountable?

As The New York Times recently reported, phoning legislators is the most effective way to make our voices heard—but phone calls can take up time that many of us don’t have. What if a service made placing these calls so easy that we had no excuse not to do it? That’s where the Daily Action alerts come in. The idea is, with the help of the progressive digital media agency where my husband is a partner, to provide a sort of clearinghouse of actions we can collectively take to resist extremism.

Here’s how it works: You text the word “DAILY” to the number 228466 (or “ACTION”). After entering your ZIP code, you will receive one text message every workday about an issue that we have determined to be urgent, based on where you live. You might be calling to implore your senator or member of Congress to reject an unsavory appointee; you might be contacting Paul Ryan about safeguarding Medicare. We hope that, in time, we will have enough subscribers to target more local actions—getting Texans to call in about the new fetal-burial law, say, or North Carolinians to protest HB2.

If you decide to take action, you’ll listen to a short recorded explanation of the issue and from there, you’ll be routed to your senator, member of Congress, or other relevant elected official, where you can weigh in on the issue at hand. You don’t have to get bogged down in logistics to take a stand. You can make the phone calls when you’re walking to the bus stop, or waiting in line for your morning latte. In 90 seconds door to door, you can conscientiously object and be done with it.

I don’t claim any great experience or expertise. But I do know that now is not the time to be silent. For these alerts to produce results, we need a lot of participants: Ten thousand people calling on the same day to object to a radical Cabinet pick—or, conversely, to congratulate their legislators on taking a brave stand—will have a lot more impact than just a smattering of people doing so.

And we must register discomfort when, say, the president-elect chooses a white nationalist who wants to “burn it down” as his closest advisor, or a Putin crony as the country’s highest-ranked diplomat. We must speak up if an anti-choice extremist is nominated to the Supreme Court, and when the speaker of the House starts to advance his long-cherished dream of eliminating the social safety net.

Let’s not forget: The majority of our country believes in decency, in moderation, in sanity. If we all band together against extremism and spend a few minutes a day using tools that have been proven to work, we can make a big difference in defending those values we share as Americans.

To join the Daily Action group, text the word “DAILY” to the number 228466 (or “A-C-T-I-O-N”) today. You can also sign up at www.dailyaction.org.